Member-only story
Seeing through the Eyes of Monet
Poet Lisel Mueller Sees the Light
In my last post I wrote about Lisel Mueller, her background, and her 1958 poem “A Grackle Observed” in which she was “dazzled by the unexpected sheen [of] yellow, purple, and green” of a common grackle — a species of blackbird — as it moved from shade to sun to shade again. Something in “the peculiar angle of the sun” turned the bird into something more meaningful, into an iridescent vision entering the mind “as pure light.”
In another poem, she wrote of the light that was present at a moment of sheer wonder. Consider what the honeyed light of afternoon does in her beautiful thought-poem “In Passing” (published in Mueller’s 1996 book “Alive Together: New and Selected Poems” for which she won the Pulitzer Prize):
In Passing
How swiftly the strained honey
of afternoon light
flows into darkness
and the closed bud shrugs off
its special mystery
in order to break into blossom
as if what exists, exists
so that it can be lost
and become precious
Light of day is always in transit, and here it swiftly flows into darkness. Initially I thought the passing of daylight is what caused the bud to open, but now I think the events in the first two stanzas are correlated but not causally linked. In stanza 1 we pass…
